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There’s more to the Vancouver man than you would expect

Billionaire Francesco Aquilini is part of a network dedicated to helping at-risk youth, The Boys Club Network, in his old East Vancouver neighbourhood. This Vancouver Sun exclusive video is directed by Jaman Lloyd and produced by Carrie Wheeler.

Every night, Dzinh Nguyen would squeeze his eyes tight shut and pray. “I would pray for someone to come and help me. To come and help my family.”

Nguyen’s parents, immigrants from Vietnam, worked two jobs, night and day shifts as labourers and cleaners. The family, barely able to make ends meet, lived on Vancouver’s east side. Nguyen fended for himself. Often, there wasn’t enough to eat.

“My mother worked so hard, I didn’t understand it. She was never around, and when she was she was so tired. They weren’t doing well.”

The only bright spot in Nguyen’s life was a young uncle, who cared for him.

“One day, I came home. The police were there. I was told to go wait in my room. When I came out I saw my mom walking away, crying.”

His uncle had been shot and killed.

“I wasn’t old enough to understand why. But I was old enough to understand hate.”

The perpetrators were never caught. “It ate at me.”

By the time Nguyen entered Templeton Secondary School, “inside, nothing was right.”

Although he kept up a polite exterior and a place on the honour roll, there was something in his eyes. At least that’s what the guys told him. The ones that targeted him, and invited him to hang out. Gave him a new family.

The gang members that would make him, in the words of one of his teachers, “a monster.”

Francesco Aquilini wants to go for coffee, but it is NHL trade deadline day. Stuff is going on. “We better have coffee here,” he says.

In his modest street-level office, the window is barred by scaffolding on the Hastings Street side, the desk is held up on one end by a battered black fridge, and his business degrees from SFU and UCLA are propped up against the wall.

Behind the desk, a Canucks game schedule is posted on the wall.

It is hardly the set-up you would expect of the billionaire businessman and developer, owner of the Vancouver Canucks and a treasure trove of wine so valuable it has become a flashpoint in his recent divorce battle.

Aquilini’s long legs take up most of the office’s square footage as he leans back, cranks his neck up to check the trade drama playing out on the television screen in the corner.

Luongo’s name flashes across the screen. His phone rings. “It’s Mike (Gillis),” he says, unfolds like a long measuring stick and slips out the door.

When he gets back, he shrugs it off. “Champagne problems, that’s what I call it. Too many good players.”

The media pisses him off. Too eastern based. “We’ve got the best team in the country and all they talk about is Leafs, Leafs, Leafs.”

He turns his back to the TV, ready to talk. About Dzinh. About the day he went back to his former high school, Templeton, on Vancouver’s east side, to eat pizza and sit in a room on folding chairs in front of two dozen at-risk boys. Guys who looked at him, like Dzinh says he did, thinking: “Okay, rich guy. Okay, douchebag prick. What do you know about our lives?”

He’s ready to talk about how that day, when a group of lost boys who turned to him — some with looks of awe or curiosity, some hardened and challenging — it changed him.

Dzinh Nguyen was one those boys.

The kids were part of a group hand-picked by teacher Jim Crescenzo and Walter Mustapich, then Templeton’s vice-principal, for an after-school program they had brainstormed called the Boys Club Network.

Crescenzo and Mustapich went after the gang members, the criminals, the guys into drugs, the kids that had no one and nothing and no reason to care.

Crescenzo and Mustapich had both been raised in the neighbourhood, gone to Templeton, and returned as educators. They had seen the tough guys they grew up with bumming quarters outside the liquor store.

Some had made it out. What made the difference, they figured, was family.

Could they create a place for these boys, a second family?

They figured they would meet every Wednesday. They’d feed them pizza — that would be one reason to come. And then they would start to talk. They’d see what they could do.

To make it work, they needed money. And they needed mentors, men who had gone to Templeton and would come back and share their stories. Show them a different way.

Mustapich summoned up the guts to cold-call Aquilini, a former classmate. The guy who used to sneak into the Coliseum, pop open the back door so the rest of them could sidle in to watch the games. Aquilini agreed to go down.

And kept going back.

Dzinh wasn’t about to tell Aquilini that he prayed, that he had been praying since he was a kid, for someone, anyone, to help him, help his family.

Dzinh figured Aquilini and the rest of them didn’t know a thing about his life.

He was on probation at Templeton. Loan-sharking with an Asian gang at night, drinking in the back rooms of restaurants, living high, putting his sister through school with the proceeds, and skirting through violence. He figured he had it worked out. But he didn’t want to get kicked out of school and disappoint his mother.

So he joined the program. He thought he would play both sides and wait until this whole Boys Club experiment “blew up in their faces.”

Aquilini’s face flushes when he hears how Dzinh prayed for years, for someone to help his family. Suddenly the babble of the sportscasters on TV fades. Luongo’s still in play, but Aquilini doesn’t want to talk about that.

“Look at me, I’m crying.”

If you asked his brother Roberto what makes Aquilini successful, or what he struggles with the most, who he is, who he’s been since he was a kid, you get three words. “A soft heart.”

The owner of the Canucks opens his arms, spreads his palms. The emotions come, his face softens, changes. Then he composes himself. “The only difference between me and them was that I had a family to go home to every night. A warm meal. Parents who had the time and who cared.”

But it isn’t the differences between him and the kids in the Boys Club Network that made him answer the call from Crescenzo and Mustapich, a call that has become, in some ways, a calling.

Aquilini grew up on Vancouver’s east side, just a couple of blocks from the Pacific Coliseum. Yeah, he used to sneak in, he says, and pop open a back door for his buddies.

“I got into some stuff,” he says.

Driving back down Hastings, Aquilini points out the window of the car: The florist, the London Drugs, the place he opened his first bank account.

He points out the roller rink next to the Coliseum, the race track, the places they played street hockey. A lot of street hockey.

And the manicured lawns, the fountains and sculptures of the Italian Gardens just south of the Coliseum, an inspiration he led to bring green space back to the neighbourhood.

“It was a tough environment. A lot of broken families. Blue-collar. Hard-working. Unemployment. You settle your arguments with your fists.”

The neighbourhood back then was mostly Italian. Aquilini’s father, Luigi, a bricklayer who immigrated from Brecia, Italy, in the mid-’50s, was a hard worker.

“My Dad was a businessman. He went to work. He tried to make things happen.”

From the time he was eight, Aquilini was pulling nails and sweeping floors on construction sites for 25 cents an hour.

Luigi and his wife, Elisa, kept a close eye on the boys. “Scared the crap out of us about drugs,” says Aquilini. “I really looked up to him.”

Every Sunday, the family went to mass at Sacred Heart — Luigi, Francesco, and his brothers Roberto and Paolo standing at the back.

After church, the family went home for lunch, a traditional northern Italian dish of braised rabbit with polenta.

They chose their pieces of rabbit in the same, orderly fashion they stood at the back of the church. First Luigi, then Francesco, Roberto and Paolo.

Home and the family table was a place of warmth and comfort, of order and respect.

But home didn’t go with him when he went to school.

Aquilini vividly remembers his first day at Templeton. He knew no one — the family had moved back to Italy for three years. He was starting over here.

“Crime was all around you. Everything was settled with a fight. Guys had knives.”

That first day he went out to shoot some hoops at lunch break. “Suddenly, I was surrounded by 10 guys and they all start whipping the ball at me. That happened every day pretty much. Bullying. Harassment.”

He started hanging around with guys that were “shady characters”, some who were into petty crime.

“I didn’t do it, but I almost did it. Breaking in, stealing car radios, stealing cars.”

Aquilini found football in Grade 11, bulked up like the coach told him to, started playing right defensive tackle. Football, he says, gave him a place to go, a sense of himself.

But by Grade 12, football had become a little too important. Aquilini wasn’t doing so well in his classes — he figured it didn’t matter. He was a star on the football field, and was in line for a football scholarship to USC.

“I let myself get a little to high on it,” he says.

He got called into the office, to face the principal and his furious father. One of his teachers wanted to flunk him for his miserable attendance.

“The principal said I would never amount to anything. But the worst thing was, I had disappointed my Dad.”

His father expected him to set a better example.

At home, the situation exploded.

“I ran away,” says Aquilini. After a couple of days he returned. “I knew I had a home to go to.”

When Luigi Aquilini sat down with his son and heard he was planning on a career in the NFL, he says, “I was nice about it, but I said to him, ‘You want to be a Dallas Cowboy? How much are you going to make? You’ll be living like a celebrity. You’ll spend all your money because you’ll have to live high.”

Why not come work with the family?

“When my Dad showed me that he wanted me, that was the best feeling in the world,” says Aquilini.

All three boys would join the family business.

Some thirty-five years later, the Aquilini Investment Group is a $5-billion enterprise run by Luigi and the three sons, all of them still standing in respectful order, like they used to at the back of Sacred Heart. The owners of the Canucks still have the traditional family lunch on Sunday, always rabbit, although now the choice pieces go to whoever gets there first.

The feeling remains the same, although Aquilini’s family has gone through challenges that have become, for him, painfully public.

Aquilini is in the middle of a divorce, his second, from the mother of four of his five children. Mediation failed, and the couple is headed to divorce court. Although the Aquilini family has won an order to keep family financial details private as the case goes forward, it’s the kids he worries about the most.

But he still believes in love, second chances. “I’m in love now,” he says of his girlfriend, Martine Argent. The model, artist and single mother of two teens has an independent streak that has taken her around the world, and a hockey history. Her grandfather was a pro hockey player.

Being the owner of the town’s biggest sports franchise means also being its public face, something that has taken some getting used to. There have been some hard lessons. When the Canucks lost the series in Game 7 against the Bruins in 2011, Aquilini’s reaction in the aftermath became part of the public feeding frenzy.

“I felt huge disappointment ... Losing at home in front of the fans. I felt really bad. I felt something really bad had happened.”

As Aquilini stood in the Canucks dressing room, reporters started to get close. The lights of a television crew flared in his face.

“I really felt for the players. I wanted to be by myself. I couldn’t be. I wanted to have that private moment.”

He cursed at the reporter.

“They wanted to get me on camera crying, I didn’t want anyone to see that. The emotional side of me really came out. I could see all our players crying in the dressing room. I could hear the Boston Bruins cheering. Elation and real sadness. All these wild emotions. It was weird.”

He called the reporter and apologized the next day. If he could have that moment back, he says he would do it differently. But it is not the emotions that he would change. It’s the way he handled them.

That is one of the things he talks about to the kids in the Boys Club. “I talk to them about that, about how I deal with problems.”

So what does he get out of spending time with these boys, when he could just turn around and write them a cheque?

“They want to see me. Oh, he’s the owner of the Canucks. He went to Templeton, and he’s here talking to me. It’s validation for them. By being there, I get a chance to make an impact.”

Sometimes, the words almost sound like his Dad’s when they come out.

“I tell them to watch who they hang around with. If you are hanging around with gangsters, you’re going to be a gangster. If you’re hanging around with drug addicts, you’re going to be a drug addict. You need to self-reflect on that. Teenagers want to be validated. They want to feel important. They want to feel socially acceptable. My Dad was very big on that. He would watch who I hung around with, and if someone wasn’t appropriate, he would tell me.”

Dzinh Nguyen had been going to the Boys Club for two years, but violence was threatening to explode between him and another boy in the club — a rival he “hated and despised” — when Crescenzo and Mustapich asked Aquilini for advice.

“I said bring them down to the box. Make sure they wear a tie, and they know how to use a knife and fork.”

Nguyen had been playing along, but deep down nothing had changed. “I was known for being really crafty. But I was living a double life.”

Aquilini doesn’t remember exactly what he said. “I was just a catalyst. That’s all I can really do.”

Crescenzo remembers a sumptuous meal — “steak and lobster.” Nguyen doesn’t even remember what they ate. It was the first time Nguyen had ever been to a game. He was enthralled.

“Francesco pulled the two of us aside, this established, successful businessman, and started talking to us about how to fix a small problem, how fixing the small problems is really about how you deal with adversity. I grew up thinking every rich successful guy was an ignorant douchebag that doesn’t give a fuck. Here he was spending time with us.

“Deep down, something lit up. Maybe I’m not such a bad person. Maybe I’m not as stupid as people say. Maybe I am a somebody.”

The boys made up, Dzinh dropped out of the gang, graduated from Templeton, and won a full scholarship to BCIT, one of four the college makes available to boys in partnership with the Boys Club Network.

Taking the Boys Club kids to hockey games, giving them the owner’s box, and a new program called Leadership in the Locker Room, are just a few of the ways Aquilini has invested in the Boys Club, now his charity of choice. Financial support? That too.

Aquilini was recognized this week for his involvement in the Boys Club Network at a gala in which he received the Lions Club’s highest honour for community service, the Medal of Merit.

But he shrugs off any focus on that. “What am I gonna say? I’m just doing what I do, keep working, work hard.”

A couple of blocks away from the Pacific Coliseum, the house his father built — where his mother cooked the Sunday feasts, where he and his brothers played street hockey, suffered over homework, rebelled but also took their ordered places at the table — still stands.

“Success, my success comes from a basket of things,” says Aquilini as he walks around the house at Oxford and Slocan. “Determination, resiliency, a company culture that revolves around integrity, honesty, hard work, discipline, focus. I tell this to the hockey players too. Everyone comes with a different skill set, but the core values, you’ve got to have them. My Dad taught me that. It’s been our North Star.”

Aquilini points out the stone wall, the wrought-iron railings that cup the windows. “My Dad built it all,” he says. They still own the house. His eyes rake past the rustic squeezed-joint mortar, the bricks his father laid, a giant rhododendron just budding, the pink camellia in full bloom.

“Just up that way was where I used to walk to Templeton,” he says, gesturing south on Slocan.

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